Читать книгу Come Up and See Me Sometime - Erika Krouse - Страница 8

“Can you handle it?”

“Yeah, and I can kick it around, too.”

—Mae West

When I heard the news I said, “How can I be infertile when I’m the only member of my family that’s ever gone to therapy?”

The doctor pulled off her gloves and said, “Just probably infertile. You never know, miracles happen. Are you married?” I shook my head. She said, “Then what does it matter?” She left the room, closing the door behind her. I slowly pulled my feet out of the stirrups.

The rest of the day, I felt different. When I drove back to the office I thought, Look at the infertile woman in the car, driving a stick shift. At the supermarket salad bar I thought, Infertile woman selects a tomato.

But then I realized, maybe this is the answer. I’ve always felt secretly disgusted with new mothers. I hate how they say, “I just want to spend all my time at home with my baby.” Yeah, and I just want to spend all my time in the Oval Office with Ben and Jerry, but we can’t all manage that, can we?

Then there’s the way they talk incessantly about their bodies, and what baby eats for breakfast. And that maternity leave, extending indefinitely until they don’t know how to run all the latest computer programs anymore.

But that’s just rich women, mothers with the luxuries of both money and partner. The rest of them take correspondence courses to finish their mail-order MBAs, when all they ever wanted to do was paint pictures. Or tap dance. Anything but what they’re doing now: searching for affordable day care and thinking of creative ways to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Suffering for the sake of the future, which is the ultimate form of procrastination. No way, baby. So to speak. Not me, anyway.

MY FRIEND Mona called me at work. “I forget. Does the rabbit die or not? When you’re pregnant?”

“Dies. ‘The rabbit died.’ Yeah, that sounds right.”

Silence on her end while I kept typing. Then, dryly through the receiver, “So what do I have to do? Knit a booty?”

I froze, arms suspended above the keyboard in a Frankenstein pose. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Shit. Shit.”

I turned and my chair squeaked. Mona said, “It’s David’s. Don’t congratulate me. I’m going to 86 it. Will you come? Be the, uh, daddy?”

“Of course. David won’t go?”

“David doesn’t know. Hey, that rhymes.” I didn’t say anything. She said, “Oh come on, Stephanie.”

“You should tell him.”

“Not David. He tells Hillary jokes. David eats bacon for breakfast every day.”

“So, he’s a little conservative. What do you expect? We live in Colorado Springs.”

“He’d make me marry him and have the kid, and then he’d name it after himself.”

“Nobody can make you get married, Mona.”

“Please.” Her voice was thin and far away.

“OK,” I said. “We’ll do it and then you’ll sleep over.”

“Like a slumber party. Sort of.”

“How are you feeling?”

“All right. Either I’m shallow, more liberal than I thought, or it hasn’t quite hit me yet.”

“Hey, what if you had the baby and gave it to me?” I actually said this casually. Then I immediately thought about my studio apartment, my big plans to teach English in the Democratic Republic of Congo, how I haven’t been able to afford a dentist visit in almost three years.

Mona snorted.

“It’s feasible,” I said.

“Stephanie. It’s mine.”

“Yeah.”

“No creative solutions. I’m getting an abortion.”

“I’ll help you.”

“Thank you. Just get me through the door.”

“It’s a simple procedure.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Then I heard through the phone, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. But be glad you don’t ever have to go through this. Really.” Even so, there was something smug in her voice. Or maybe it was tears or food or something like that.

I WALKED Mona across the picket line of men and women shouting in the rain. “Murderers,” they yelled. Mona gave them the finger. I did the same. We shared an umbrella above our frizzing hair. All the picketers wore shiny slickers, their bangs plastered to their foreheads.

A wet man in a yellow raincoat shook a jar in our faces. Mona put her hand over her mouth. I stopped and asked him, “If you have so much respect for human life, how can you put it in an old pickle jar?” He silently shook the jar again like a maraca, the fetus rattling inside.

Once we were in the office, the nurses were kind, the doctor was kind, it was over in three hours. Several women tapped their feet in the waiting room. A few men fidgeted or slept in their seats. I read an article about the complex social structure of bees, and then one on Van Gogh’s ear. I thought about taking a walk, but it was still raining. I ate three candy bars. I half expected to hear the sounds of a large vacuum cleaner.

I examined the faces of the women as they pushed open the double doors, rejoining boyfriends or rattling their own car keys. They didn’t seem happy or sad. They seemed crampy.

Then Mona was standing at the counter, writing a check. She didn’t look at me when I put my hand on her back. “How was it?”

She was concentrating on signing her name. She picked up a big pink receipt with procedures checked off in carbon ink and dropped it into her purse. Then she turned to me and sighed.

“Too easy. It made me uneasy.”

She looked fine. Pink cheeks, hair a little mussed in the back. I patted it down. She said, “Make a plan for me. I’m whipped.” We headed out. As we passed the picketers, Mona waved slowly like the Queen of England, from the wrist.

I’ve never made the mistake of thinking that everything I do is good. I’ve chosen badly on purpose, badly by accident. I once made fun of a man who was stumbling across the street, too drunk for walking, nearly too drunk to stand. Then I realized too late that he was in fact disabled or suffering from some incapacitating disease. The smile still trembling on my face like an aftershock. I’ve been terribly sorry for things unnoticed, for things stopped just in time or nearly too late. For all those choices better off aborted or barren.

How does this fit in? It doesn’t, does it?

BABIES WERE suddenly everywhere I went. In the fluorescent light of a midnight search in the grocery store for melatonin, they looked like shrieking Claymation characters, legs banging maniacally against the side of the grocery cart. Or sometimes they looked like those plastic dolls with a string coming out of their backs. There was one lying prostrate at the Koala Bear Kare station in the airport bathroom, laughing every time a toilet flushed. Babies at a distance. Across the street, a pregnant woman pushed a stroller in front of my window every five minutes. Babies on TV, selling diapers, clothes, dog food, even automobiles. Automobiles with car seats.

Somehow it wasn’t the same thing when they were already five or six and whining about the long line at the bank, or asking for some ridiculous doll that shaves its own legs. But as babies—heads wobbling on their latex necks, toes wrinkled from sucking, long threads of spit hanging from their soggy lower lips—I couldn’t figure out how to feel. So I polled my friends.

“What do you think about when you think about infertility?”

“Nothing,” Mark said.

“At all?”

“Well, I think a little bit about my vasectomy.”

“You had a vasectomy?” He simultaneously looked both more and less attractive than he had a minute ago.

“After my first marriage.”

“Have you ever regretted it?”

“Yeah, when the AIDS thing became a big deal and I had to wear condoms anyway.”

“So you have no feelings about infertility itself?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It took human civilization until Christ’s time to even come up with the number zero.”

“Point, please?”

“What is there to think about something that isn’t anything?”

When I asked Amy, she said, “I think about my ovaries. And how you’re born with them and all the eggs are already intact. And each of those eggs contains all the eggs of future generations. Like a little universe. So when I think about infertility, I think, no universe. No universe … But it’s all so academic anyway, I mean, who really gets to experience their full potential?”

Anthony said, “I think about the world population problem and say, hallelujah, Darwinism at work.”

Mona said, “Big deal, adopt.”

Fran said, “I think about life becoming real exotic. Like, no more working as a receptionist. I think about getting a graduate degree, maybe a cool job that lets you wear the miniskirts that nobody else gets to wear because they all get varicose veins when they’re pregnant. Oh yeah, and you can tattoo your stomach. You can live in foreign countries with no health insurance.”

Ellen said, “Husband dog sofa.”

“What?”

“Those are the three stages of commitment in a woman’s life. First she gets married. Then she adopts a dog. When she’s really settling down, she finally buys herself a sofa.”

“I have a sofa.”

“You found it next to a dumpster, Stephanie.”

“What about pregnancy? As a commitment?”

“Well, that’s extra. That’s unplanned, much of the time. It’s not really relevant except in its result.”

“Which is?”

She stared at me. “The baby. You have a baby.”

WHEN I asked my shrink if I was a control freak, he finished saying “Absolutely” before I finished saying “freak.” I told him that I once worked with a woman who carried a remote control in her purse. Whenever she got worried or angry, she took it out and stroked it like a gerbil. My shrink said that if I keep comparing myself to severe neurotics, I’ll think that anything is permissible.

David, Mona’s David, called me up at home. He asked to meet me. I agreed, mostly because I was bored. Adventure, scandal, I told myself. Free drinks. We met in a country-western bar called the Elvis Pelvis.

“Thing is,” David said once we sat down, “I know Mona’s hiding something from me.”

I drank my beer.

“I always considered you a friend, Stephanie,” David said.

“Likewise, David.” But I didn’t. I had only seen him at the occasional barbecue, party, movie. Dinner out, dinner in, hike, rock concert, camping trip, vacation, funeral, softball game. But I was Mona’s friend.

Now he touched my hand. “There’s nothing I can’t handle, Stephanie.”

I smiled.

Whenever you spend time with a friend’s boyfriend, you grant him a sexiness that he might not deserve, just because your friend finds him somehow desirable. I considered David objectively for the first time. His butt had that expansive thing going on. It wasn’t big yet, but just give it a few more years in front of the television. His face was ruddy and childish, but something about his nose suggested that he could have been an artist, that he had a natural, neglected talent for something.

“Who’s she fucking?” he asked, which woke me up. I started laughing.

“You’re cruel,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” I straightened my face. “What makes you think something crazy like that?”

“She won’t sleep with me. She’s had these mysterious disappearances. Overnight. I called and called, and then I went over to her place. She’s distant. She’s uninterested.”

“Maybe she’s just … uninterested.”

“I wouldn’t mind that so much. I just don’t want to be made an idiot.”

I felt sorry for him. I scanned his face, handsome in anger. I was sort of afraid for Mona if he ever found out about the abortion. I realized that I probably knew every single Democrat in Colorado Springs, and David wasn’t one of them.

“Why don’t you try being supportive of her,” I suggested.

“What?” He leaned forward and looked hard at my face.

“Suh. Por. Tive.”

“What?” His expression got gentle. “You have something in your teeth.”

Horrified, I immediately lodged my fingers in my mouth. “Where?”

“Here.” He brushed my hands away and delicately stroked one of my front teeth. I felt the pressure and not the touch. I started to blush.

“There, it’s gone,” he said. He looked at me again, considering. I tilted my head. I wasn’t taken in. But I understood the appeal.

He ruined it by suddenly demanding, “How about a little compassion for me?”

“There is no such thing as compassion,” I said. He rolled his eyes, but I’m telling you. Nobody has it easy. Nobody gets anything they don’t make themselves.

I VISITED Mona at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. She opened the door, still in pajamas. She said, “I’m watching a Natalie Wood movie. Wanna?”

The movie was about a pregnant woman who didn’t want to get married. Steve McQueen was the irritated father-to-be. She made him drinks and got mad at him, and he played the banjo in the street to make it all better. I didn’t really get it. I kept thinking about Natalie Wood falling into the water and never coming up.

When the credits started rolling I asked, “How are you doing?”

“I don’t know. I got rid of the fetus because I wanted a life. But now I’m just moping around wondering if I made a mistake. And I’ve started thinking about God.”

“God?”

“Yeah, and Hell. Like, what if it’s all true? Let’s take a cosmic leap into the possible. What if abortions really do send you to Hell? Then does motherhood make you a saint? Are men just pawns in this game of the afterlife, and women call all the shots?”

“No,” I told her, “men murder, rape, declare war. It seems that they have some stake in eternal damnation.”

“But abortions seem worse somehow. Because we’re impatient. We don’t wait to see what happens.”

“What would have happened, Mona?”

She shrugged. “I would have been a pissed-off mother who resented her kid. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like, you’re perfect or nearly so in the beginning and little by little your life becomes one long catalogue of mistakes.”

“Like bowling,” I said.

“So was it fair of me to deprive this fetus of its one shot at perfection?”

“Maybe you did the right thing by sparing it the rest. All those inevitable failures that make us human beings.”

“Maybe I should have let all that transpire. Who am I to say, Stephanie? Instead, I killed it. Those possibilities,” she amended when she saw my look.

“What about your own possibilities? Did you really want to trade your life for your baby’s? Isn’t that another kind of murder? Is that what you want?”

“No,” Mona said. “But looking at it now, wouldn’t it have been a relief? An awful relief?”

I LEFT town to camp alone at the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. As I drove south past Pueblo, the land flattened and rose like acres of brown bread. The high desert. Everything smelled of pinion sap and the things that flow in the desert but nowhere else.

I stopped to look at a roadside memorial. They were scattered all over the roads of southern Colorado, at every sharp corner where someone had perished in a car. This memorial was for an entire dead family—parents and kids. Someone had set up a life-sized nativity scene with gigantic crosses, candles, and silk roses. Strewn about were bandannas, key chains, rosaries, earrings. Plastic flowers in a yogurt container, a Christmas wreath, a macaroni necklace, a wooden cross dangling inside a spaghetti jar, a squash, a stuffed rabbit, a pack of Luckies, a photograph of the mountains, and a scrunchie. For the dead little girl.

I got to the campgrounds after dark. I set up my tent and lay down, but I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept wondering if someone would invade my tent with a knife, and imagining what I would do then. I listened to the rustling sounds of other campers, shushing their children or having muffled sex. Finally, I crawled out of my tent, grabbed a bottle of water and headed toward the dunes in the moonlight.

I took off my sandals to wade through the stream that separated the scrub from the sand, and then started hiking the dunes barefoot. At first it felt like I was just pushing sand around with my feet, but then I started moving in the shadows.

I climbed until there was nothing in any direction but hulking masses of sand. I sat on the ridge of a dune, hugged my knees and tried to decipher the shapes. I thought I saw my mother’s nose. I saw the shape of a dog I knew when I was small. I stayed there all night, listening to the wind smooth out the surfaces, breathing the smell of sand without ocean, without reason.

In the morning, I opened my eyes to the sun already midway up the sky. I sat up on the dune and brushed sand out of my hair. Everything had changed color now that it was light. Blue sky, yellow sand, and me between the two. I realized that I hadn’t been missed. Nobody had noticed me, alone on the dunes or anywhere else. Nobody was going to hurt me; nobody was going to do anything at all to me. I thought about the word nobody as I started back toward camp. It was getting hot already. The sand shifted through my sandals. It felt like the tips of matches just barely lit, then blown out.

I MET WITH Mona after I got back from my trip, my skin glowing and rubbed raw. We met at a diner and hugged across the table. She patted her short hair immediately afterwards. “You look gritty,” she said. We talked about her work.

After our food came, Mona leaned over her fluorescent grilled cheese sandwich. “We’re going to try to get pregnant.”

For a second, I thought she meant herself and me. Then, “Oh no, Mona. No.”

Mona pulled the paper napkin out of her lap and began shredding it on the table. “I told him everything. He was really hurt. It brought us, um, closer.” She turned red while I stared at her. Then she stuck her chin out. “He wants a baby with me. I’m keeping it, this one.” She nodded, as if it were merely a matter of will.

“But David? He’s ridiculous.” I threw my sandwich down on the plate. It made a flat sound.

Mona looked away. “Knock it off, Stephanie.”

“You don’t even like him that much. You make fun of the way he breathes, for God’s sake.” I mimicked her impression, this whistling, grunting thing that he does. She does it better.

“He’s going to be my husband.” The word was designed to stop all debate. I tried one more time.

“But the abortion …”

Mona held up her hand at the word. “Don’t want to think about that. It was a mistake.”

“You were so sure at the time.”

Neither of us talked for a while. I ate my tired roast beef sandwich, the meat dyeing the mayonnaise pink. Mona played with the napkin scraps on the table. I wiped my mouth over and over, for lack of anything else to do. Mona poked a hole in the crust of her grilled cheese sandwich.

“Mona,” I finally said. “You don’t even like children. You call them ‘yard apes.’”

“Well. I just got … so damn lonely, Stephanie. Besides, Jesus.” She looked up. “You can’t just walk through life like you’re a casual observer. I mean, you act like everything is a rational choice all the time, like there’s this layer of cellophane between you and the world. You have to engage. Engage.”

I snapped, “I am engaged.”

“It’s human. Everyone needs a family. You can adopt.”

“As a single mom? In debt?”

“You have choices. You can find a way to fill in that part of your life.”

“My life is good. It’s already complete.”

But here’s what I didn’t tell her: compare it to the sand dunes by the full moon, when the absence of light in the shadows is absolute, nonnegotiable. Floating upright and alone on top of the world. The way it feels to walk on such a surface.

WE LOST touch, Mona and I. I missed her wedding with David. The invitation came on a cream-colored piece of cardboard with the words, “It’s a Wedding!” embossed on the front. I had to leave town for a business trip that weekend. I sent a gift, something they had registered for—spoons.

Not much changed for me—some dates, a promotion, a new haircut. My grandmother died, I got a dog, and then a cat. The cat hated the dog. The dog liked the cat. That was pretty much my life.

It had been almost two years since I had seen her last when Mona called me at work to invite me to a housewarming party. I scribbled down her new address and said carefully that I’d love to come. Equally carefully, she said that she, David, and their one-year-old baby were looking forward to seeing me.

I drove to her house, a silty number in the worst neighborhood in town. There were bars on the downstairs windows. It was directly in front of a city park where I’d heard you could get a great deal on crack, if you didn’t care about quality. There was a liquor store next door, pocked with dirt. In front, a drunk man was talking to a woman in vinyl shorts and red high heels.

When I arrived, the sun had just set behind the mountains. David opened the door, kissed my cheek and led me inside. The walls were covered in cracked green wallpaper, and I said, “How wonderfully retro!” He showed me the garage, which had a workbench and tools all set up on hooks. David looked a little fatter, but healthy and so happy. He couldn’t think of anything to ask me besides, “Like my garage?” I laughed, “Yes!” We stared at each other, delighted.

In the center of a group of women, Mona was carrying a big baby in her arms. It drooled on her shirt, and she rubbed at the silk with a cocktail napkin, saying irritably, “Oh, Christ.” When she saw me, she smiled and held up the baby like it was an Oscar. We hugged, one-armed. Then she told me the baby’s name, which I immediately forgot.

It squirmed in Mona’s arms. I leaned down and said, “Hello.” It rattled a fat chew-toy in my face, then rubbed it gently against my cheek. The toy left a viscous smear of saliva and some kind of slime, maybe Gerber’s Candied Yams or mucus. The baby announced, “Buh buh buh” above the party babble. Mona said, “Buh buh buh” back, almost sarcastically. Then, “Hold her, will you? I’m starving.”

Suddenly, it was in my arms. A real baby. Wiggly. Soft. Yet scratchy.

Mona pushed past her guests and headed toward the kitchen. I wrapped one arm around the baby’s sweaty back and cupped its head with my other hand. “Huh,” I said, jogging it onto my shoulder.

I remembered something I had read once, that they’re supposed to have a soft spot in their skulls, so I started touching its head. Lightly at first, then pressing harder and harder. Nothing, just scalp. It wrapped its tiny hand, which looked like an imitation of a hand, around my hair, which looked real. It started chewing on the hair. I worried about the chemicals in shampoo and conditioner, and the toxins in hair spray. And the smoke from cigarettes, so I walked toward the open sliding glass door, away from the perfume and the microscopic mites that cling to upholstery.

A woman in the party had started to sing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” a capella; it was a little performance. Everyone gathered around and someone switched off the stereo. The woman had a voice that was horrible in that trained kind of way. I stared, fascinated. The baby did, too. I felt the baby’s body grow taut as it took a deep breath. Then it started to scream.

Mona was somewhere else. Guests looked at us, irritated. I started toward David, but he waved his hand at me—away, away. He mouthed outside, and I nodded, just like I was his wife.

I stepped out the sliding glass doors to the shabby backyard. It was long and skinny, running along the house like a moat in front of the shrubs that distinguished the border of the park. I started walking back and forth along the yard in the dusk, my favorite time of day. The baby stopped crying and started pulling my hair again.

The baby was now talking to my hair, calling it buh-buh-buh with an occasional scream. It pushed against my stomach with its feet, and smashed its other hand against my collarbone. The rattle fell from its damp grasp and rolled into the dirt. My left arm was falling asleep. I bent down to grab the rattle, but couldn’t manage, so I kicked it out of sight.

That didn’t work. The baby was now looking for the rattle, calling to it with vowels of anguish and despair. I tried walking away, but it held out its hands, squirmed and cried. It wanted down. I placed it carefully on the grass near the door, after looking for bugs and broken glass. It stopped crying and crouched on hands and knees, head rigid. Oh boy, I thought.

I hurried across the lawn until I found the rattle, which now looked like a speckled pink egg. I thought of other mothers, and how they cleaned off a baby’s pacifier by putting it in their own mouths. I started to put the rattle in my mouth, but just couldn’t. Instead, I wiped it on my skirt, where it left a greasy stain.

I turned around to pick up the baby again, but it was gone. Impossible, I thought. I hurried a few steps back to where it had been, but instead of a baby, I saw only a patch of dying grass in the porch light. There was no baby anywhere on the lawn. It was really gone. Gone.

I went back inside to where the party was. One woman looked like she had the baby, but it was another baby. Similar to Mona’s baby, but not quite enough. Wearing a purple snuggie, not a green one.

I peered under the tables and chairs. “Did you lose an earring or something?” a woman asked me.

“Uh, no, I lost something else.” Nothing between people’s feet, in their arms.

“What exactly did you lose?” the woman asked.

It was nowhere in sight—not inside, and not on the lawn. That left only the place where the lawn ended and the park began. It must have crawled that way, toward the crack pipes and heroin needles. I felt sick. I rushed back outside and stepped off the lawn, plunging into the thick brush. My hands trembled as they pulled aside branches. The air grew dimmer.

A twig nearly poked me in the eye, but I swerved in time. I listened hard for baby sounds, then for any sounds at all over my erratic footsteps and the party noise filtering in through the trees. That woman was still singing.

“Baby,” I whispered, “oh please.”

I began to run, twigs lashing my arms, dead leaves under my feet. I ran in concentric circles. Nobody was there. My feet broke everything I stepped on, snapping dry beneath me. I started to cry. All the colors merged together into varying shades of gray in the twilight. I ran faster.

I nearly stepped on something glowing next to my foot, the shine of tearable flesh. I stopped. That baby was there, sitting perfectly still on a bare patch of ground, eyes open. Yes, the right baby. Not some random baby in the woods.

I bent over and carefully picked her up. We were both shaking. I held her by the armpits and inspected her all over in that raw twilight. I felt her firm, real body beneath her clothes. This little person.

She moved in my hands and looked back at me. Straight in the eyes, just like she was waiting for me to name it. You know. The damage.